Author: Meg Melville
How well do you really know your child? Know what they are thinking, feeling, doing, accessing, saying? Parents always want to believe the absolute best about their children, certainly when it comes to telling the truth. BUT kids don’t always tell the truth, be that to protect themselves, someone else or out of fear or shame. It may not be until parents are confronted with incontrovertible proof, that they are hit with the actual truth, the reality.
For those who have watched the Netflix series, Adolescence,this will resonate. Raw, confronting, shocking and heartbreaking-all in one. You are left asking, “How did it come to this? What happened to lead a 13 year-old boy to do what he did? Why did he do it?”
Writing over 100 years ago, post WW1, Kurt Hahn wrote about the crisis of the family, the crisis of society and the social diseases continually expanding into the Western world, threatening our growth and progress. Though the context in the 2020’s is different from the 1920’s, much of what he saw as contributing to this can help explain this decline:
- Decline in physical health (we have become sedentary, heavily processed diet)
- Decline in initiative and a spirit of adventure (we have become spectators not participants in life)
- Decline in imagination and recollection (stifling of creativity; too hard; not my problem)
- Decline in carefulness and thoroughness (looking for quick fixes and easy solutions)
- Decline in self-discipline (material affluence and instant gratification has weakened our resolve)
- Decline in compassion and mercy (diminished sense of community and the greater good of humanity vs self, egoism)
Kurt Hahn did not stop at his assessment of this decline; he went on to devise the strategy to deal with it. He was a firm believer in experiential education and was an equally firm believer that this was critical as the child entered into their adolescent phase of development. He firmly believed in the power of education and experiential learning to combat what he saw as the insidious shift in culture. What would he make of the dependence on and exposure to social media, the deep and dark web and AI of today’s adolescents?
In his writings he believed that adolescents needed to be in close contact with challenging and engaging pursuits, experience adventure, get to know their strengths, test their boundaries, discover their “grande passion” and most importantly, let them experience triumph and defeat.
Ahead of his time, he believed in educating the “complete person”. By the end of the 1930’s he had created a system of education that essentially was based on the following belief:
“I regard it as the foremost task of education to ensure the survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an undefeatable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self-denial and above all, compassion.”
Kurt Hahn went on to found the famous boarding schools in Germany (Salem), Scotland (Gordonstoun), the Round Square Conference Schools, Outward Bound Schools, The United World Colleges and the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award.
This was no small contribution to education in the 20th century and is more relevant today than it has ever been, as families are challenged by the busyness of life and the challenges of the digital underworld. Adolescence is a tricky phase to navigate for kids and their parents. The pull of social media, the strong desire to belong to a peer group, even if the group’s values are not reflective of their own or their family’s. Working out who they are and where they fit in can be a time of great vulnerability, as the series Adolescence reminds us. So, it is no surprise that families look to schools to provide the education for the “complete person” or as Stephen Covey called it, “the whole person paradigm”, an education that embraces mind, heart, body and spirit. A school experience that does provide breadth of opportunity well beyond the academic curriculum, one that requires challenge, commitment, tenacity, self-reflection, teamwork and actually does keep kids engaged and inspired to find their “grande passion”. This is in part, the antedote to dependence on social media; kids are more connected to the real world in real time. Triumph and defeat or success and failure are an integral part this journey, you can’t have one without the other. We need to rethink our relationship with failure or defeat and see it as an opportunity to reflect, re-evaluate and respond- if we want our kids to be resilient. The term “tough love” comes to mind, too.
So, when we hear that all these sorts of activities: the carnivals, the camps, the excursions, the performances, the team competitions, after-school clubs, the community based service learning programs, are actually being phased out of schools, then we risk further disengagement by our adolescents, who then turn to social media to fill their time and headspace. It is not just in TV series that this ends very badly, it does in real life, too.
Parents need to keep their kids really close and choose a school that will keep their kids meaningfully, purposefully busy and engaged, in order to keep a healthy perspective on their adolescent lives.
A final word from Kurt Hahn to our adolescents:
You are needed. You are able to achieve more than others and you believe in yourself. If you could be made to see this, perhaps for the rest of your life, you will be unwilling to settle for less.
